We've seen Bluetooth audio accessories that will stream the output from your telly or hi-fi to a pair of wireless headphones, and we've tried devices that will pick up streamed stereo and feed through to a pair of ordinary cabled cans. But we haven't seen many gadgets that do both.

2009 was the year the netbook really took off, with vendors rushing to release model after model after model, and few of them ending the year with the same selection of machines that they were offering at the start. We looked at dozens of them, all largely matched on performance, but with very different battery lives, prices and builds.

Nobody wants to go back to the early days of packaged applications when green screens were the norm and users got what they were given and had to come to IT if they wanted anything different. But should we really be going to the other extreme, as some would argue, and let users take control?

An MIT-organised crowdsourced network of spotters was the first to locate ten large red balloons placed around the USA on Saturday, winning a $40k prize from DARPA. Most of the cash will be distributed among the network's members according to a simple formula whose design lay behind the MIT team's success.

Once the unequalled leader among mobile phone manufacturers, Nokia still returns impressive sales, but ceded its dominance of the smartphone market with the arrival of the iPhone. It's been playing catch-up ever since, sticking rigidly to a Symbian OS that only seemed to grow older looking with each new device.

It seems that most of the IT industry is trying to figure out how to make money by vertically integrating some aspects of the data centre and selling a complete solution that addresses the whole stack. Novell - known predominantly for its NetWare and SUSE Linux operating systems - is no exception.

The US military's famous walker robot, aka "BigDog" or the "Legged Squad Support System", has received a further $3m in funding. However, the machine doesn't yet seem very close to seeing frontline military service.

If touchscreen phones were the new buzz gadgets of 2008, this has certainly been the year of the ereader. This is especially true in the US, where operators have spotted the opportunity to adopt the integrated device/content model beloved of Apple, and build a new revenue stream.

European ministers have reached agreement on a new EU-wide patent structure after lengthy negotiations but have failed to find a way past the biggest obstacle to an EU-wide patent: the cost of translation.

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) has decided to close down its UFO reporting service, saying that it is an "inappropriate use of defence resources". The Ministry has closed down the voicemail and email addresses formerly available for reporting sightings.

The idea of putting servers, storage, and networking gear into metal shipping containers and linking them together into a data centre cluster is not a new idea - Sun Microsystems was the first to propose the idea back in October 2006 - but it is catching on enough that IBM is endorsing the concept and shipping a product.

Last week, Microsoft unveiled all sorts of new stuff on the search engine known as Bing. Which means the Redmond obsessives at Google have spent the ensuing days desperately announcing as many of their own search thingys as they possible can.